Supreme Court protects corporate polluters

On June 30, in Michigan v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate polluters and struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 emission controls regulations. The case centered on the EPA’s 2011 rules about mercury and other emissions from power plants. Twenty-one states sued saying that the rule was too expensive and thus amounted to government overreach.

The court majority agreed.

As Veronica Combs of the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil put it:

The states won the case last week. Five justices ruled that the EPA had not taken into account how much it would cost industry to comply with these new rules. The five justices dismissed the health benefits of these rules – fewer deaths and less illness thanks to cleaner air – as too small to merit the cost to industry.

Simple as that, the Court showed its true colors. Saving lives and preventing illness is less important than corporate profits. The Supreme Court is an institution of the capitalist state and as such acts in the interests of capitalism. The exceptions to this rule, the few times when the Court makes a progressive decision, have occurred under the pressure of a mass movement in the streets that challenges the traditional societal norms (as in Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges.)

Combs continues:

The energy industry claims that it will cost $9.6 billion per year to comply with the new pollution rules, but that health benefits of cleaner air amount to only $4 – $6 million. Supporters of the EPA rules estimate the savings to be at least $37 billion, a figure that includes costs related to as many as 11,000 premature deaths and more than a half-million lost days of work each year. An MIT study from 2013 estimated that that a person who dies from an air pollution-related cause typically dies about a decade earlier than he or she otherwise might have.

These statistics are hard to contradict. Pollution makes people sick and kills people and these premature deaths and debilitating illnesses have a significant social and economic impact. The problem is that within the narrative of capitalist individualism, preserving the profits of corporations outweighs the importance of protecting life and health of people.

This decision is another example of how capitalism is unable to protect the environment. Even when a government agency charged with “environmental protection” tries to do the right thing; it can be overruled by the Supreme Court acting to protect corporate profits. We need socialism, a rational, planned economic system based on the principle of sustainably meeting peoples’ needs. And in the meantime, we need to build a mass movement on the streets to make the polluters pay, a movement so strong that the Supreme Court will not be able to ignore us.